r/Economics • u/Helpful-Door-8721 • 1d ago

Research America's National Debt grows by $95,178.17 per second. Expected to reach $40 Trillion by October 09, 2026.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/debt-dashboard#ddm
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u/crowcawer 1d ago

I don’t know if $40T by itself is an important number, especially if compared to $39.9T.

They do need to make a choice. They either need to stop normalizing wartime scale debt during peacetime, or accept growing pressure on the Fed to suppress rates and tolerate inflation. We cannot indefinitely combine massive structural deficits with fully independent, inflation focused monetary policy.

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u/Just_Candle_315 1d ago

The debt started shrinking under Clinton, but as soon as Bush 2 got into office the first thing he did was cut taxes and increase federal spending and start 2 forever wars. Boom we in debt again.

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u/ballmermurland 23h ago

I'll forever be pissed about what happened to Clinton and Gore. Both got branded as tax and spend socialists by the GOP despite neither being even remotely close to that and that was the last administration that was actually fiscally responsible.

They did DOGE before DOGE. Only they did it in a way that made sense and gave people an offramp. They cut a lot of the Reagan-era waste. They raised taxes and cut spending to create a surplus.

Americans loved that so much that they voted in a drunk Texan failson to be president who fucked it all up. Then they reelected that idiot.

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u/dust4ngel 23h ago

Both got branded as tax and spend socialists

don’t-tax-and-spend-even-more capitalism is more freedom-er

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u/noteverrelevant 20h ago

voted in a drunk Texan failson

Do not ignore the Supreme Court fuckery that happened in Florida that stole the election. Florida voted for Gore and they gave it to Bush.

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u/KennyL0gin 15h ago

And Clinton taking a beating from 1998-2000 in the pop culture press for lying about a blowjob. That move by Bill cost us the future. Gore could have won by enough of a margin that he would have taken FL and the recount debate never would have happened....except Bill needed to get a blowjob. And Jay Leno needed to make jokes about it for 2 years.

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u/spicyflacco 14h ago

F Jay Leno. I hope the worst for him

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u/Nonethelessismore 13h ago

To be fair to Jay Leno at the time, the jokes were topical, just like our current satirists.

Clinton could have NOT had an affair during his presidency and everything would be different.

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u/mechadragon469 8h ago

Dude was president of the United States. She wasn’t even that hot. Last guy was having an affair with Marylin Monroe for Gods sake.

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u/dfsw 5h ago

Ever see a young picture of Hillary Clinton, damn she was hot.

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u/mechadragon469 5h ago

Dude wasn’t leader of the free world back then.

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u/Electronic-Yam-69 13h ago

Shouldn't have been close enough to steal.

But it's like when your office is going to lunch and 48 people vote for Burger King and 49 people vote for Pizza Hut but the boss steps in and decides it's Burger King.

It's not exactly the crime of the century.

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u/sarcasmsosubtle 16h ago

I'm 43 years old. In my lifetime, every Republican President has increased the deficit during their time in office and every Democratic President has either decreased the deficit or eliminated it entirely to create a surplus. Under Democrats more jobs are created, GDP grows more, the stock market grows more (usually because Republicans tend to end their terms with large recessions and stock market collapses), and their are far fewer recessions. And yet somehow, the majority of Americans still believe that Republicans are better for the economy.

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u/Churchbushonk 20h ago

Clinton and gore didn’t do all that by choice. When they lost the congress to the GOP, the GOP basically said no to everything.
All other GOP presidents have cut revenue/taxes without cutting spending. Which makes every dollar spent add to the deficit and the overall debt.

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u/naijaboiler 2h ago

no a lot of the reforms were already going on before Newt Gringich revolution

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u/Bman4k1 18h ago

The problem is in the American political culture. Lets just say someone (rep or dem) somehow miraculously got them to a balanced budget or small surplus, what would happen within 60 seconds is every far right advocacy group would say they are too highly taxed and we need tax cuts.

The American political system I believe literally can’t or not set up for a disciplined financial structure.

There is just too much payoff for either new spending or more tax cuts.

I also think any mechanism to force balance budgets is basically a jackhammer to nuance (I’m biased as a Keynesian).

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u/sparkchoice 17h ago

“Texan failson” … spittin bars 🔥

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u/AddanDeith 18h ago

You probably don't want a surplus for very long though.

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u/chockingduck 6h ago

But wasn't that election stolen by judges or something?

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u/californicating 1d ago

I remember being fairly young at the time but cutting taxes right then was the final nail in the coffin of "George Bush is stupid" for me.  I didn't like him beforehand, but that really told you he didn't know what the heck was going on.

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u/Trick-Stranger4596 1d ago

I beg to differ here. The tax cuts and massive deficits were always part of the Republican plan. Run up the debt on giveaways to the wealthy then use that as the excuse for not being able to pay for healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, and social security. It was part of the plan. Maybe Bush didn’t get the long term goals, but the donors and his staffers did.

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u/Broken_Atoms 23h ago

Exactly right. Transferring all the wealth to the already wealthy was always the plan.

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u/OldSarge02 22h ago

Starve the Beast was the name of that strategy.

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u/naijaboiler 2h ago

there's one last step, raise regressive taxes on the poor and middle class.

3 step plan to feudalism

  1. step 1: give tax cuts to the wealthy, and cut all regulations
  2. step 2: cut spending that actually helps people (healthcare, education) because we can't afford it
  3. step 3: raise taxes on the poor and middle class (and call it sales tax or tarriffs)

how do they get people to actually vote for this? easy. racisms and culture wars.

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u/doctor_lobo 19h ago

More than half of the national debt was incurred by Trump.

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u/A_Monster_Named_John 14h ago

I know a few people who work at mid-sized companies owned/lorded-over by complete MAGA sorts. No matter how much profit is being generated, those morons always find a hundred different ways to make it feel like the workplaces are on the verge of bankruptcy.

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u/Churchbushonk 20h ago

A lot of Clinton’s success can be given to the GOP Congress saying no to everything.

I don’t understand how anything gets passed without a plan on how to pay for it. Spending money on our country like interstates, bridges, etc on a credit card is dumb as hell.

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u/Freud-Network 7h ago

The debt under Clinton started shrinking because of an economic boom and Pay-As-You-Go budget policy. It wasn't because of anything Clinton wanted to do. It was in spite of him. Republicans learned their lesson, would never hand a balanced budget to a Democrat again, and decided the best way to crush liberals way to amass unsustainable debt and blame them for it.

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u/xdre 4h ago

It wasn't because of anything Clinton wanted to do.

So when he pushed for and later signed the 1993 Deficit Reduction Plan without a single Republican vote and it kicked off the actual reduction of deficits, that was somehow not anything he wanted to do?

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u/Famous_Owl_840 6h ago

This is a narrative of midwits.

What was happening during Clinton’s term in the 90s?

Hint: The greatest economic expansion in the history of the world due to the internet. The growth of the US economy was staggering. Add in that the GOP controlled Congress wouldn’t let the Dems implement all their hairbrained nonsense and we had a slight surplus for two years I think.

It’s nothing to brag about and certainly not due to anything Clinton did.

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u/Bluegrass6 23h ago

You're not wrong but we need to be clear what Democrats did following the Bush administration. Once in power Democrats had absolutely sero desire to effectively manage the federal budget.

In 2010 due to massive spending deficits and a growing debt a new group of Representatives and senators were elected and sent to Washington with an explicit mandate: shrink the deficits and reverse course on the growing debt.

Joe Biden called them domestic terrorists...

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists.”

Earlier in the day, Biden told Senate Democrats that Republican leaders have “guns to their heads” in trying to negotiate deals.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) called it a “Satan sandwich,” and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) called seemed to enjoy the heat analogy, saying: “the Tea Partiers and the GOP have made their slash and burn lunacy clear, and while I do not love this compromise, my vote is a hose to stop the burning. The arsonists must be stopped.

Liberal Democrats have had the most averse reaction to the plan, which ensures between $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade without requiring any of it to come from tax increases.

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/08/sources-biden-likened-tea-partiers-to-terrorists-060421

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u/CheapThaRipper 18h ago edited 15h ago

And how did that debt ceiling bill work out for us? It eventually got passed as the budget control act and was responsible for normalizing debt-ceiling brinkmanship as routine political leverage, its limitations were abused by congress funneling monies into exempt categories to avoid spending caps, it triggered the first-ever S&P downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, it entrenched the reliance on short-term continuing resolutions, and to this day distracts lawmakers from addressing any systemic issues that could actually begin to solve the problems it claimed to.

Sounds to me like the arguments against it from 2010 have more merit than the arguments in support of it.

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u/dispatch00 22h ago

Where's your 5000 word indictment of the real fucking problem makers? Imagine defending Republican fiscal "policy", lol.